With the advancement of E-Commerce and Electronic Music Distribution (EMD), users will purchase content over the Internet and record the content on media at their remote, or home location. One proposed business model for EMD is “pay per play.” whereby a user will only pay for content to the extent that the content is played by the user. While this model may be easy to implement in the home environment, where content playback equipment can be connected through a network that monitors the number of plays, a problem is how to implement “pay per play” in the portable player environment.
For purposes of this document, the term “content” can be interpreted to mean music content, video content, computer software content, computer gaming content and similar types of content which can be downloaded from the Internet. The term “media” or “recording media” or similar terms are intended to encompass tape, disc, magnetic, optical, magneto-optical, silicon and other storage technologies which can be adapted to store digital representations of content.